A photo of Virginia Alfano is affixed to her tombstone. (The Birmingham News / Tamika Moore)

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- For 80 years, a marble statue of an angel stood in silent watch over 4-year-old Virginia Alfano's grave at the Fraternal Cemetery in Birmingham's Pratt City community.

But now, the statue, placed there in 1931 by the child's grieving parents, is gone, cut clean off its two-tiered pedestal by thieves. The theft, discovered soon after the April 27 tornado that destroyed much of the North Pratt neighborhood near the cemetery, is heartbreaking to Virginia's sisters, Mary Camp, 71, and Pat Schilleci, 81, both of Hoover.

"My family and I are deeply hurt by this," Camp said.

"I can't comprehend it," Schilleci added.

The sisters want Virginia's angel back, and they're offering an undisclosed reward for its return.

"I'm obsessed with it. I can't let it go after (it's been at the grave) all these many years," Camp said.

At first, the family thought the tornado was responsible for taking the monument, but the cemetery escaped major damage. Then they realized the statue was cut from its pedestal.

They reported the theft to the Birmingham Police Department, which is investigating the case. Birmingham Police Detective Talana Brown said it's hard to know when the statue was taken but said a detective is checking with area scrap yards to see if it has shown up.

The statue features a 3-foot-tall, barefoot angel with childlike features. Its wings are outspread, and a cross is held up against its right side.

This angel was stolen from the Pratt City grave of four-year-old Virginia Alfano. (Special)

It memorializes the little girl, who was killed on April 30, 1931, after she was hit by a car.

Her parents, Vincent and Mary Alfano, had been keeping a vigil by the bedside of then 2-year-old daughter Pat, who was gravely ill with pneumonia and not expected to live.

The parents sent their older children to school and Virginia went to stay with a relative. Virginia and a young cousin found some change and slipped out of the house to buy candy at a grocery store about a block away. On the way back, the little girl was killed when she was hit by a car.

Stuart Oates, director of downtown Birmingham's historic Oak Hill Cemetery, said he was not surprised the statue was taken. "It's very common," he said. Bronze and other metals in urns and markers are often sold for scrap or, like stone and marble items, sold for garden or interior decorating, he said.

About the only thing that can be done to stop thefts from cemeteries is to have someone watching the property, Oates said. That can be especially difficult at cemeteries such as Fraternal, which has had no perpetual care and few burials in the last 20 to 30 years. The families of those buried there maintain their loved ones' burial plots.

That's what the Alfano family and their descendants have done since 1913, when the family's first patriarch, Vincent Buscarino, was buried there after succumbing to injuries suffered in the Edgewater mine explosion. Virginia's parents buried her in the same plot as her grandfather.

Anyone with information about the angel can contact the Birmingham Police Department's burglary unit at 254-1782.